Below is a video of James Comey’s June 8th open-session testimony before the U.S. Senate, a link to a transcript of these remarks, and his printed statement for the record (released before the hearing but not delivered in Comey’s oral testimony given today).
James Comey testimony transcript on Trump and Russia @ POLITICO.
Statement for the Record, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, James B. Comey, June 8, 2017:
I settled in on the couch yesterday and took in the surgical defenestration of Trump by Comey. I’ve had my beefs with Comey, but he sure laid a lot of wood on the DL yesterday. It was interesting to note that every network preempted programming for the event. Everyone except FOX, that is. FOX showed Jerry Springer, instead, in an unintended bit of self-parody.
Some observations:
• The Senate committee behaved itself, for the most part. Of course, Cornyn had to do his usual Texas-box-turtle-sitting-on-a-post act. Just imagine him running the FBI for a moment… John McCain shuffled in, ex-oficio, in his bathrobe and bedroom slippers, having evaded the Silver Alert Nazis, and made a convincing case for his retirement. He raved incoherently about how this was all the Hildebeest’s fault for conspiring with the Russians to sink her campaign. Finally Burr cut him off, mercifully. McCain drifts in and out. Sometimes he makes perfect sense. Other times, his synapses seem to snap in some sort of random fashion, like when he foisted Palin on the nation. He has served his country well, but it is time for him to retire to guarding his lawn full-time and trying to figure out where he left his car keys.
• JeffBo Sessions III is in deep shit. He, despite all of his pious flag-waving, seems to be a Russian mole. He has lied about that at least three times, and Comey left some dark hints that we ain’t seed nuttin yet. JBS3 has risen to the top of the dead-pool and is likely the next to go. There are many reasons why JeffBo is a miserable analog of a human being, and being a ComSymp is likely the least of them, but if it takes him out, that is all that matters. Will he beat Spicer out the door??
• The Wisco Kid trotted out the lamest excuse ever for Trump :”He is just new to all of this”. Trump is not at all new to being an asshole, a thug, and a lying sack-of-shit. He has been doing this all of his life. Ryan is seeing his wet-dream of every food pantry having a line of malnourished grannies in front of it jostling for position to buy scratch-and-dent cases of cat food, for next week’s meals, fade away. This will not end well for the Wisco-Kid either.
• Trump is on borrowed time. When his major “win” is having Comey verify that he was not under investigation three times, he is gut-shot and staggering. There is massive joy in the conservative media over this. Trump is claiming “complete vindication”. They are whistling past the graveyard, though, as all that matters now is what Mueller is doing, and that most assuredly is investigating Trump.
I’m starting to have a bit of hope about the future of my country.
Much appreciated, of course. I share your take on this – in the end, however long the slog head, Trump’s position is weak – slowly but increasingly so politically, and even now dead intellectually. Ryan’s descent (and he’s already crawled into a pit for Trump) continues – the new-to-this defense is absurd. The man who asks others to leave the room isn’t new to any of this; the man who initiates contact multiple times after Comey had explained proper procedure early on isn’t new to this. He’s a boss who won’t take an honest answer to a dishonest question.
McCain, it seems, ran one race too many (’16). Staying around an extra term, so to speak, has claimed yet another politician.
If the GOP’s complicity with Trump was supposed to win a legislative payoff, that’s looking like a bad bet.
They gerrymandered wherever they could, to achieve near-invincibility from Democrats, only to find that they were vulnerable from the worst corners of their own party. I’ve no sympathy for them, as they have and will continue to do damage as long as those worst corners remain destructively reactionary, but it’s still something to behold.
They may yet go farther still in an effort to retain power, but I believe it will prove unavailing to them.
It’s so rare to see something this extreme, indeed beyond anything in living memory in America, as a party ruins itself. Yet here we are, watching it. (How far would one have to look back to find this? These Republicans are like northern copperheads or, even worse, southern confederates: gravely wrong.)
However much lies ahead, those in oppostion will see this through.
I just monitored Trump’s news conference w/pres. of Romania. Trump called
Comey a liar, refused to say if he has recordings to back himself up and
volunteered to testify to Mueller under oath. A lot of meat in just two
questions from the press.
It all smells like a naked bluff to me. He is drawing dead. He will do none
of the above…
Meanwhile his lawyer is throwing blatant witness intimidation moves at
Comey. That has a low probability of success and is most likely to blow up
in his face. Comey is not easy to stampede.
Trump has very few cards left, save the war of distraction. Look out
Grenada!
Thanks – I’ll look for that clip from today. Bluff sure sounds right – Trump wouldn’t get to answer only the questions that he wanted, in the way he wanted them presented. Even at that, this would be nothing like the litigation over his (admittedly shady) New York real estate deals or branding schemes for junk products.
Too funny on Grenada! – this is, sadly, probably not the time to be vacationing on small foreign islands easily accessible by military helicopters or landing craft.